Communicator

The “mobile first” approach returns the website’s focus to content and message. The communicator develops clear and effective communications by understanding their organization’s requirements and the audience’s needs. They generate content, prioritize information and evaluate content flow to encourage a successful user experience of their website.

For a (frequently hilarious) gallery of mobile fail, the appropriately-named WTF Mobile Web site is a good way to waste an hour (and maybe learn from someone else’s mistakes at the same time). Mostly it’s a simple blog of screenshots from websites or apps that just don’t handle mobile devices very well. Check it out.

However, buried in the “About” page for this little blog is a very perceptive summary of the challenges that mobile devices create for web designers:

The problem isn’t any one person. The problem is that we’ve all been doing this thing called Making a Website for a long time in a particular way. And now everything is changing. Sure some developers are resistant to learning new things, but most developers are interested, excited and willing. But this isn’t a problem that you can fix by just switching out which bit of code to use. It’s bigger than that. Content strategy, design, business all have to change. The fundamental way in which people work together to plan and coordinate the creation of a website has to change. It’s not easy to go into work one day and say to a big team, “Hey, uh, we need to restructure our design process and completely change what we are doing with our mobile web strategy. Uh, why? Yeah, just because.”

As Internet use shifts more toward mobile devices and as time spent on individual web pages falls, the content of web pages and its presentation become increasingly important. A mobile-friendly website should impart information in a simple, quick and attractive manner. As communicators, our role becomes increasingly important in creating accessible, responsive websites. Keep the following in mind when working on mobile-first websites.